Halabja, the Kurdish town gassed by Saddam Hussein in March 1988

HALABJA, Iraq, Sept 15 (AFP) - The Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq, which US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Monday, suffered a notorious and deadly gas attack ordered by then president Saddam Hussein in 1988.

On March 16, 1988, around 5,000 people, mostly women and children, perished in minutes when the Iraqi army unleashed poison gas into this town 250 kilometres (150 miles) northeast of Baghdad and a dozen kilometres (six miles) from the Iranian border.

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The day before, as the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war raged, Iraqi Kurds from the Tehran-backed Patriotic Union of Kurdistan captured this thriving farming town of over 40,000 inhabitants.

Iraqi retaliation was brutal. As forces began pounding the town with bombs, guerrillas and most of the men retreated to the surrounding hills, leaving behind the elderly, women and children.

Then in the afternoon and evening of March 16, Iraqi planes dropped dozens of chemical bombs on Halabja in a wave of attacks lasting five hours, Kurdish witnesses said.

Experts say they contained a concoction of chemical agents, including concentrated tear gas, mustard gas and the VX nerve agent, shipped to Iraq by the United States, France and Britain, which backed Saddam in his eight-year war with Iran.

One survivor, Tahsin Ali, then aged 15, is now a doctor.

"When the jets bombed there was a strange sound, not like conventional bombs. Then someone came to our house and shouted 'Gas! Gas!'", he said.

"So we got in the car and closed all the doors. We had to drive over dead bodies to get out. I saw a woman who had blood spurting from her nose, her ears and her eyes. Some people were vomiting green liquid. Others were turning black and their skin was bubbling. Others were laughing before falling dead."

"Then I could smell apples, and I fell unconscious. When I woke up, all I could see were hundreds of bodies."

It was the largest gas attack unleashed against civilians during combat, experts say.

At Halabja, 75 percent of the 5,000 who were massacred were women and children. Another 7,000 were wounded, according to current statistics released by Kurdish authorities.

When those who fled to the hills returned home shortly afterwards, they quickly informed foreign journalists who rushed to the scene. Reporters filmed and photographed the mass of corpses littered outside homes, struck down as they tried to escape the noxious fumes, many with their mouthes and noses covered in blood.

Fifteen years on, the town still suffers from the results of the massacre.

"Even today, people are still dying of cancer and leukemia, suffering from asthma and sterility and miscarriages. The impact of this attack will be felt for many generations," a Kurdish doctor told AFP in March.

The Iraqis had used a deadly cocktail of mustard gas and nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX, according to testimony given to the US Senate by Christine Gosden, a genetics specialist at the University of Liverpool, who visited Halabja in 1998.

"The occurrences of genetic mutations and carcinogenesis in this population appear comparable with those who were one to two kilometers from ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and show that the chemicals used in the attack have a general effect on the body similar to that of ionizing radiation," said Gosden.

She said the rate of leukaemia, other cancers and deformities at birth was three to five times higher than the norm as a result of the attack.

It was not the first time that Iraq had used its arsenal of chemical weapons. An estimated 20,000 Iranian soldiers were killed in Iraqi chemical attacks between 1983 and 1988, according to a statement by the US State Department on the 10th anniversary of Halabja.

"The only way to ensure that the Saddam Hussein regime will never again be able to possess or use weapons of mass destruction, against the Iraqi people or anyone else, is for UN weapons inspectors to have immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to inspect any site in Iraq," the State Department said.

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